Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly could see the ship’s company closed up at action stations. There were many newcomers among them, still going through the shocks of the changeover from peace to war. This war was a different one from the last, with different problems, though war itself remained the same and still brought out the same old human imperfections. The Hostilities-Only men were still struggling to become part of a crew. There still weren’t many of them, but to them everything was horrifyingly new – the sea, the ship, even seasickness – and, with the battle fleets taking all the best destroyers, only the old ones were left for escort duties, so that they were all desperately tired, desperately dirty and desperately overstretched.

  His mind busy, even as he was alert to what was going on around him, Kelly glanced to starboard. The old W-class ship, Wrestler, now converted to escort vessel, was just heaving herself out of a trough. To port was the armed merchantman, Sappho, formerly a Lampert and Holt ship. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was another converted destroyer, Vandyke, together with the corvette, Sanderling. By the standards of the day the convoy was well-protected.

  To Kelly and everybody else who had taken the anti-submarine course at Portland, it had always seemed that a defensive policy was the only one that could be applied to convoy work: make the U-boats come to the escort, rather than form escorts into hunting groups to search the vast ocean spaces for the enemy. Perhaps the desire to assume the offensive had been implicit in everything the Admiralty had done since the signal, ‘Winston is back,’ had been sent out in 1939, but at a time when the submariners were also still learning, not only were the hunting groups achieving negligible successes but they were certainly not using their new radar sets properly by thundering about the sea after stale scents and false periscopes sighted by aircrews, trawler skippers and old gentlemen fishing from the ends of piers. Judging by the reports that had to be investigated, the sea was teeming with German U-boats, and the radar operators – still nervously believing their sets made them impotent – were new enough to the game to be regularly sick over their dials.

  Kelly’s own group had originally included the destroyers, Firebrand and Fortunate, the escort vessel, Wheeler, and the corvette, Dunlin, but these four had been snatched from him to oversee a convoy from Nova Scotia which was supposed to have joined them and never had. But, as everybody knew, when an escort group was named, the only thing that was certain was the leader, while the rest depended on what was available.

  There had been a brush with a U-boat during the night. It had come to nothing, but Kelly was in no doubt that other submarines would have been called into the assault, because the Germans were beginning to realise that, against the new devices being used against them, it was necessary to contribute numbers. As full daylight came, he began to relax. It might be possible now to go below, change, and perhaps even snatch a little sleep. He had got over Teresa’s death more quickly than he could have imagined possible, and had wondered uncomfortably more than once if his feelings for her sprang merely from the fact that she looked like his long-lost Charley. It had become still easier when it had dawned on him that she’d never intended to leave Santander with him. She’d gone back again and again into danger because she’d had to, afraid to live and because of her faith unafraid to die. He’d been angry at her sacrifice and bitter at what he felt were her muddled beliefs, but the anger and the bitterness had finally died, and in New York, lonely as he watched his officers and men stream ashore to enjoy themselves with the bright lights and the girls, his thoughts had turned again to Charley Upfold.

  Was it six years, or was it seven since she’d sailed in Mauritania for a job in New York? He’d looked her up in the telephone directory under her married name of Kimister and again under her maiden name of Upfold, but there had been nobody who could possibly have been her. The only person he knew who could still have been in contact with her to give her address was her sister, Mabel, but she was in England and married to a retired colonel of the Devons, who had somehow got himself back into the army and across the Channel to France.

  ‘I’m going below for a wash, Number One,’ he said to the first lieutenant. ‘But don’t for a minute imagine we’ve thrown him off because I dare bet our particulars have been passed to every U-boat in the area not wearing an ear trumpet.’

  As he reached his cabin, Rumbelo was waiting for him. The same old Rumbelo recalled to service and happy to be back with Kelly. With a son serving in the destroyer, Grafton, it was hard on Rumbelo to have to return to sea, because he’d just got used to being settled at Thakeham. But he hadn’t grumbled, accepting it as normal, and grateful to be back with Kelly instead of in some unrewarding job ashore. The gap that had appeared between them when, to Rumbelo’s disgust, Kelly had married the wrong woman in 1927, had happily disappeared when the marriage had broken up, and Rumbelo and Biddy and their children had taken the place, with Hugh Withinshawe, of the family that Kelly had never had.

  He was just reaching out to take Kelly’s cap when the buzzer went, and his hand changed its direction automatically to lift the instrument and pass it to Kelly.

  ‘Sir! Bridge! Wrestler has a contact!’

  Snatching his cap back, Kelly hurried for the ladder. Below him, as he reached the bridge screen, was the four-inch gun and the forecastle streaming with water, the chain cables rising and falling as the bow drove into the sea.

  ‘Where’s Wrestler now?’ he demanded at once of the officer of the watch.

  ‘She’s moved astern, sir.’

  ‘Very well, we’ll join her. Bring her round to starboard.’

  There was silence among the men alert at their action stations. Most of them were peacetime regulars with seven, twelve or twenty-two-year engagements, many of them enlisted in the years of the Depression to avoid unemployment. A lot of them had been awaiting their release when the war had broken out and among them were recalled men like Rumbelo, often middle-aged and in no condition for the spartan regime of a destroyer’s mess decks in the Atlantic. There were also a few Naval Reservists, trawlermen and merchant seamen, who, if not very good yet at their drill, were skilled seamen, and one or two Naval Volunteer Reservists, the Saturday afternoon sailors, mostly pure amateurs with more enthusiasm than expertise. But even they were learning fast, and they all of them – from the captain downwards – belonged to a small and closely-kept community, from which they could never escape. Aboard a destroyer, there was little time or room for pleasure and never freedom from noise or movement. Perhaps it was the one thing that held them together and made them a team.

  As Feudal came round on the starboard side of the convoy, they saw that Wrestler had hoisted a signal and the yeoman of signals sang out. ‘Wrestler in contact, sir!’

  Kelly’s eyes narrowed. William Latimer, the captain of Wrestler was well known to him. He had met him in 1927 up the Yangtze, when they’d stood alongside each other at Chinkiang with a small group of sailors holding off a mob of Chinese intent on murdering every white in sight. Kelly had been a lieutenant commander then and Latimer had been a midshipman. He’d done well in the intervening years, though Wrestler was his first ship and he was still young enough and enthusiastic enough to want to depth-charge everything from a clump of seaweed to a shoal of herring.

  Wrestler was steering away from the convoy now, pitching drunkenly, huge sheets of spray lifting over her bridge. She was steaming full ahead and it seemed that Latimer was going to drop something, if only for luck. At that moment, another flag fluttered to Wrestler’s yard arm.

  ‘Wrestler attacking, sir!’

  They all watched, wondering how good the contact was, and saw the depth charges go down. After a few moments the sea bulged and huge columns of grey-green water rose high above them. As the spray settled, they waited with their glasses trained.

  ‘From Wrestler, sir. “Lost contact.”’

  As they came round, the spray slashing across the bridge to coat it with a thin sparkling crust and fill mouths with the taste
of salt, they were close to the other ship, and Kelly leaned on the bridge coaming, his eyes narrow and glittering as he watched from under the tarnished gold of his cap.

  ‘Call her up, yeoman. Tell her to continue her search and ask her the nature of the contact.’

  As the stream of flags shot up and the lamp flickered, the yeoman called out. ‘Contact firm, sir. Classified as U-boat, moving to port.’

  ‘Ask ’em what they think now?’

  ‘Still think it’s a U-boat,’ Latimer replied. ‘“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”’

  Kelly smiled. Where most naval officers relied on the Bible for their clever signals, Latimer used Shakespeare. He’d quoted The Merchant of Venice, he remembered, as they’d stood on the bund at Chinkiang under a shower of brickbats from the Chinese mob.

  He guessed Latimer was right. If the submarine had been on the point of attacking the convoy when she was contacted she would certainly have moved in the direction Latimer had indicated.

  ‘Make “Continue the search!”’ he said.

  Together, the two ships watched the convoy pass them, moving slowly through the water, suspecting that the U-boat would continue to follow the merchantmen. As Feudal swung in a wide circle towards Wrestler, the Asdic-repeater’s note was monotonous, thin and featureless above the thump and crash and hiss of the waves, then suddenly it changed to a solid echo that made the operator jump. In his tiny soundproofed compartment, his straining ears were almost deafened.

  ‘Asdic to bridge! HE reciprocating engines green oh-one-oh!’

  Kelly spoke over his shoulder to the yeoman of signals. ‘Make to Wrestler “Have strong contact.”’

  The Asdic echo sharpened. ‘Contact moving slowly right!’

  ‘Starboard twenty!’

  As the speed dropped, the Asdic’s note came more clearly. Ping-ping-ping-pong.

  ‘Good God, we’re almost on top of him!’ Kelly snapped. ‘Full ahead both. Depth charge crews stand by – fire pattern. All guns prepare to engage to starboard.’

  ‘Target drawing away right.’

  As the amatol-packed canisters exploded, the sea was split apart with an effervescent roar. Hundreds of tons of foam-white water rose slowly, hung motionless against the sky, then dematerialised into spray to fall back to the surface in a scum of dirty froth. As it settled, the Asdic operator called out.

  ‘Lost contact, sir!’

  Even as his voice died, however, the yeoman of signals came in again. ‘Wrestler’s signalling, sir. “In contact.’’’

  ‘Good for Wrestler!’

  The excitement was intense, everybody holding his breath. Wrestler was coming round like an express train now, the waves lifting over her bridge in a vast cloud of spray, and they saw the depth charges arc outwards from her stern and drop into her wake. A few moments later, the sea domed, lifted in a colossal mushroom and disintegrated in spray drifting over the foamy circle where the explosive had disturbed it.

  ‘Contact, sir! Moving left!’

  Somewhere below them, the submarine was trying to squirm to safety, and, weaving in at right angles to complete the lethal pattern, Feudal dropped her own charges, and they saw the sea erupt once more.

  ‘Contact lost, sir.’

  But Wrestler was hurtling past at full speed, bunting fluttering at the yardarm.

  ‘Wrestler still in contact, sir.’

  As Feudal swung, Wrestler lay over on her beam ends and they saw the depth charges go again.

  ‘U-boat surfacing, sir! – port bow!’ The yell came from the bridge look-out, wild and excited, and as the sea settled, from the blur of spray a black shape like a pointing hand rose at a steep angle to the surface, exposing sixty feet of the U-boat’s bows, with the jumping wire and the dark holes of the torpedo tubes and a belly streaked with rust and weed. All round it the sea boiled with the escaping air.

  Immediately, X-gun fired and the first shot struck at water level as the lifting steel tube steadied. Then the pom-pom crew got going and, enveloped in smoke and spray, the great helpless metal whale lurched, lifted higher, paused, as though suspended from the sky, then began to slide slowly back. As it went, there was a heavy underwater explosion and it vanished in a swirling whirlpool of water.

  This time, as the sea resumed its place, they saw it was black with oil and in it things were floating – bits of wood, clothing, a life jacket. Wrestler stopped, her bow dipping as her speed dropped, and lay surrounded by wreckage, her crew crowding the rails busy with buckets and grappling hooks.

  ‘Wrestler reports a body, sir. They have it on board.’

  As they surged past on the side away from the debris, the two ships looked like wooden horses on a fairground roundabout, moving up and down, one against the other, as they lifted to the waves, two old grey horses with sides that were streaked with rust and caked with salt. Men on both ships were cheering each other and waving congratulations and Latimer was on the bridge of Wrestler as they went past, yelling into the loudhailer.

  ‘We now have two bodies!’

  As they drew ahead, Kelly waved. ‘Make “Well done,”’ he said to the yeoman of signals. Though the submarine would be credited to the group, it was undoubtedly Wrestler’s victory.

  The lamp clattered and it was without surprise that Kelly heard the yeoman sing out.

  ‘Wrestler replying. “I have done service to the state. Othello.”’ Trust Latimer to come up with something clever, Kelly thought. ‘Make “Resume station and confine signals to facts.”’

  That ought to shut him up, he thought with a grim smile.

  There was no point in squashing enthusiasm but, given a chance, Latimer would be sending sonnets. He’d buy him a drink when they got home to show there was no ill feeling.

  Five

  Inishtrahull and Kintyre vanished into the mist astern and dawn was just breaking over the mountains of Argyllshire as Feudal led the convoy into the Clyde. The channel opened in front of them, with the silent pinnacle of Ailsa Craig, the jagged summit of Arran and, beyond, the softer outline of Bute. Strung along the shore were the coastal resorts of Ayrshire and Dumbarton, then they passed the Cloch light into Greenock. To the north the tawny and purple mountains lifted, and finally the coast crumbled into a rubbish heap of ugly tenements and warehouses.

  Mail came aboard, mostly bills, but there was a letter from Hugh to inform Kelly he hoped to see him shortly. He had joined the Fleet Air Arm before the war was a fortnight old and he was now finishing his training on Sea Gladiators. He’d not swerved in his belief in air power, but it had pleased Kelly that he’d chosen the Navy.

  Below decks, the sailors were still swearing to the Customs men that the nylons they’d bought in New York were personal gear, and a furious stoker was drinking himself silly on bourbon rather than let the government officials have it, when the Rear-Admiral (D)’s barge was seen approaching from the pier.

  ‘Hello,’ the Sub said. ‘Something in the wind!’

  The Admiral was in a hurry and not inclined to mince words. The prevailing mood as they’d tied up to the buoy had been light. They were due for a boiler-clean and a boiler-clean meant leave, and the feeling of relief had been clear throughout the ship. The first lieutenant had had his little joke with the coxswain and the cook with Jack Dusty, and somehow they were all together. But now suddenly, the sky had clouded over, because an admiral didn’t appear alongside a ship at full speed and scramble over the side just to inform them that a boiler-clean was all right with him. There was something unpleasant in the offing, and in a moment, the light-hearted jokes became bitter, and the word ‘bastard’, which had been a term of affection up to that moment, suddenly had a sharper edge.

  The Admiral pulled no punches. ‘You’ll have to put off your boiler-clean,’ he said. ‘It’s hard, I know, but there it is. We’re short of ships. Between ‘em, the politicals have just about done for us and I don’t know which I detest most – the ancient glittering eyes of the reactionaries or the joyless dogm
a of the left wing intellectuals.’

  Rumbelo passed over a drink and, as the Admiral swallowed it, Kelly probed gently. ‘What’s the job, sir?’

  The Admiral grunted. ‘We suspect the Germans are up to something in the North. Max Horton stationed his submarines down the Norwegian coast weeks ago and they were in a position to stop the Germans, but those asses in Westminster wouldn’t have it and they’ve been withdrawn.’

  ‘And us, sir?’

  ‘We’re making up a new flotilla. You’ll lose Sappho and Sanderling but you’re getting Freelance. They’re sneaking ore ships down the Inner Leads and we think there’s going to be trouble because we have reports of capital ships moving in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. You’re to take station off Narvik and keep watch. And while you’re there, you’re to keep a look out for Kölndom. She’s an old freighter but she’s believed to be carrying German naval and military experts from the Argentine. They’ve been there ever since we got Graf Spee in December, and some of them are important. She’s probably even armed and we think she’s making for home, because she was reported up near the Denmark Strait, heading for Bergen. Admiral Whitworth’s up there with Renown and four destroyers and the Twentieth Destroyer Flotilla’s been ordered to join him. You’ll be attached for orders.’

  ‘When do we leave, sir?’

  ‘At once. Freelance will join you from Scapa en route.’

  The nylons remained on board as the Customs men were shooed off at full speed and the stoker who’d polished off the bourbon was heard complaining drunkenly that he’d sunk his bloody booze at the rush for nothing. On the whole, though, they took it quietly, almost too quietly, because so long as the lower deck had a drip on the Navy was all right. There was a minor brush forward when the chief buffer ticked someone off for leaving his dhobying about, and when the officer of the day went to attend to it, an unidentified voice from the back shouted ‘You can chew my starboard nipple!’